Sophia Rosenfeld, Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life (2025). In her new book The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World (hereinafter Choice), historian Sophia Rosenfeld has added an engaging new book to her body of work tracing ‘ideas and assumptions’ in liberal democracies. As is her usual approach, Rosenfeld devotes her skills to recovering popular thought that shapes cultures, rather than to the ideas of major thinkers in the canon of liberal thought. In her brief summary of the primary points in The Age of Choice, she calls herself ‘a historian of the taken-for-granted’. Here, the taken-for-granted phenomenon is the modern tendency to treat ‘choice’ as a guiding light in our individual and collective lives … (more)
[Mae Kuykendall, JOTWELL, 7 November 2025]
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